
Prof and Chair of
Organizational Behavior
1. I just got a paper accepted to PSPB in which we have a footnote saying that
a record-keeping error caused us not to be able to report reliability for one of
our variables. The variables in this study were painstakingly coded by an
army of undergrads who read the transcripts of people negotiating. The two
graduate students who ran the coding process both left academia and didn’t
keep their files. We had the reliability data about all the variables except one,
by digging out an early version of the manuscript write-up, but one variable
was added later and now we’ll never know. The lesson here is for multiple
collaborators to keep the data in their files, although I’ll admit that
sometimes I still neglect to do this with student coauthors and really should."
2. I had a grad school classmate who coded participant “sex” as 0/1 and later
forgot which direction was which. The lesson here is always to code sex as
“female” (or “male”) 0/1, which also makes it easier for the readers."
3. My grad school mentor withdrew an accepted paper from a top journal
because she realized that one of the variables was coded backwards.
Hillary Anger Elfenbein